Becoming Hirsuit and Bad Pictures of Tennis

A few nice hair growth solutions images I found:

Becoming Hirsuit and Bad Pictures of Tennis


Image by Boogies with Fish
www.messersmith.name/wordpress/2010/12/15/becoming-hirsui…
Well, the last few days have been a weird circus of nearly surreal events. I’ll tell you a little about it as I go along.

First, I’ll tell you a story about a family dealing with an all too familiar tragedy, a child with a serious health problem. This came to my attention when my son sent me an email about the Brand family. Hans tells the story better than I could:
Thought you might get a kick out of the attached. Some friends of mine at church, the Brand family, have a son, Caleb, who has leukemia. On sort of a spur of the moment thing, I announced to my co-workers that for a month donated to MacKids (the MacMaster Children’s Hospital Foundation) on his behalf (it’s where he is receiving treatment) I would allow my hair to grow uncut until the money stopped coming, and for another a month I’d do the same for the beard. Apparently my co-workers want to work with a guy who looks like a crazy homeless person, because 0 in donations later I now find myself committed to at least six months of no hair cuts and two months of beard growth, and I expect that more money will be ponied up when the expiry date for the beard arrives.

I decided to try to take a photo of myself every morning as long as the money is flowing, so that I could have a record of it. The attached is the result so far.
And here is the animated image: (I could not figure out how to prevent its constant repetition, so don’t stare at it too long.)

Those of you who do not know my son will not appreciate the humour. Hans is as stable and dependable as the Rock of Gibraltar. There has been nary a hint of bother from him since he was born. He does, however, break occasionally into the mode of spontaneous goofiness, usually in a good cause. While being exceedingly proper, he exhibits a profound suspicion of up-tight propriety. This foray into the wacky world of on-the-edge symbiosis of in your face humour and sober consideration of social responsibility is just what I have always expected of him. I like to think that he got just the right mix of genes from his parents.

If you would like to read more try The Brand Family blog.

My depression has worsened, something which I expect is probably temporary. The whole seemingly endless mood is clearly reaction depression and I’m sure that it will remain variable. I know this, because the worse things get, the worse I feel. To lighten things up a bit I went to the Madang Country Club last evening to watch the tennis semi-finals. I know nearly all of the people on the teams. Some of them have been close friends for decades. I had intentions of taking some great action shots. I failed miserably. So, I’ll take great pleasure in showing you some really bad images of rather good tennis players and tell you where I went wrong. Here is Trevor Hattersley serving (no comment):

If you look carefully you can see the yellow tennis ball blasting its way off the racket. You’ll find it by following the trunk of the coconut tree.

I’ve pledged myself to avoid anti-depressants if I possibly can. I will get though this, given time. When I work my way up to full, healthy functionality I don’t want to find myself dependent on pills to keep me level. That would mean that I have simply replaced one problem with another.

While there are several reasons for my current setback, some of them I cannot discuss, because it would be an infringement on the privacy of others. I’ll leave that alone and simply say that we’ve had yet another fresh onslaught in the area of health. If you need to know, you already do. If you are the praying kind, our little mob of survivors could certainly use some non-specific petitions for our welfare.

My photographic problem was twofold. Neither had a solution. First, there was not enough light. Then there was the problem of a relatively inexpensive camera. If you care to spend enough, light is not a problem. You will undoubtedly note that the pictures are motion blurred:

That is a motion-blurred Pancal Michon dodging a sizzling return.

If you have enough bread for a full-frame sensor camera (a few thousand bucks), you’ll get a huge area to catch the photons. ISO numbers can run up into the thousands. The most I can squeeze out of my Canon G11 is about 800. With the light level which I had, that worked out to a shutter speed of about 1/40 of a second. That’s way too slow to stop tennis action.

Have a look at the extreme motion blur in this shot of Trevor. The image is useful only for illustrating how not to do it:

In that image we have the double curse of motion of the subject and motion of the camera itself, which shows up most clearly in the streaked surface of the court.

An extremely annoying beast having to do with the sale of my house back in Indiana popped up its gnarly head today. Do to a miss-addressed email presenting me with an important document which I had to sign and return as an original, I had to do some serious juggling. It seems that the rest of the world has these magical things called, Over-Night and Two Day delivery options. Well, that is just not going to happen from Papua New Guinea. If you are flying your own body by commercial air from Madang to Indianapolis it takes the better part of three days. That’s with good connections.

So, at the last minute, as I was getting ready to go to DHL and spend a small fortune in the hope that the document would arrive before the closing date, I remembered that a friend was flying to the USA today and I had already given her one document to mail for me when she arrives so that it would get there on time. I don’t know what corner my brain was hiding it, but there wasn’t much light there. I do have some hope now that the closing will go off as planned and I will start out 2011 with one less piece of excess baggage.

What do you do with a totally useless image? Turn it into art:

Massaging it with the Photoshop Poster Edges filter makes it slightly less nauseous.

I know that my responses to unfavourable developments seem to be over-reactions. I get comments, sometimes a little hurtful. I know that I’ve always been a drama queen. It’s in my blood. There is absolutely nothing I can do about that and I’ve learned to live with it. But I have  had a grand piano dropped on my head from a great height. I expect to be ultra-sensitive and more than a little paranoid. I think that I have some reason to be so. The sequence of events over the last few months is simply too outrageous to allow me to be calm and collected.

199309 – Elizabeth Prophet – interview – Royal Teton Ranch News


Image by Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos (ClintJCL)
An article about the cult my grandfather (who died before I was born) started. It’s still going on strong without him.

"CHURCH CELEBRATES 35 YEARS

A name change and a growing spurt haven’t changed the spirit of The Summit Lighthouse. And they can still throw a good party.

A few cupcakes would have been enough to go around at a Summit Lighthouse celebration when the organization began in 1958.

Thirty-five years later, during the anniversary party last month at the Royal Teton Ranch, it took more than 250 pounds of cake to do the job. It’s not that members are eating more nowadays, it’s just that there’s a whole lot more of them.

Mark Prophet and two others held the firstmeeting of The Summit Lighthouse on Aug. 7, 1958, in Philadelphia. Back then, the group that eventually became Church Universal and Triumphant had a little more than 30 people on its mailing list. Prophet and two secretaries sent out Pearls of Wisdom, letters from advanced spiritual beings known as ascended masters.

"One of Mark’s goals was to make the ascended masters a household word and have a Pearl of Wisdom on every coffee table," said Brewster Freeland, a member since 1969 who attended this year’s celebration.

And there was a lot to celebrate. About 700 people gathered at the church’s international headquarters for a chance to look back on the highlights of the last 35 years.

the movement has grown from a shoestring operation to an international organization. In 1965, Mark Prophet moved The Summit Lighthouse from Washington, D.C., to Colorado Springs.

Back in the early days, it was Ruth Farnam’s job to distribute the Pearls. "In 1966, I kept a list of those who were receiving Pearls in a show box, and it wasn’t even full," said Farnam, who was also at the picnic. "But the list began to grow real fast and I had to get two shoe boxes and then three. When I got to four shoe boxes I decided to file them a different way."

In 1973, Mark Prophet passed away. His wife, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, moved the organization to Southern California.

She continued publishing the teachings of the ascended masters, whichwas the organization’s founding purpose. And in 1975, she responded to members’ requests for a more formal church organization by founding Church Universal and Triumphant. Members formed teaching centers and study groups around the world. In 1986, Prophet moved the church headquarters to Montana. Through the movement’s growth, she published a Pearl of Wisdom every week. She and her late husband also have written more than 50 books, including "The Lost Years Of Jesus" and "The Human Aura."

"We feel that as never before we are on the cutting edge of becoming a worldwide movement, a mainstream religion of the new age of Aquarius," Prophet said at the celebration.

Staff members who normally spend their days building a worldwide movement got to flip burgers or run relay races. There were sports, crafts, games and contests. In some cases it was hard to tell who was having more fun, the participants or the spectators. Crowds cheered for tug-of-war teams and three-legged racers. People laughed until they cried as they watched competing couples race to feed each other applesauce with serving spoons–while blindfolded. "I got a lot of applesauce," said Valery Marshall. And not all of it was in her mouth. It was the blind feeding the blind.

The more sedate played chess, watched movies, strolled through the ranch’s tree farm or just lounged in the sun.

Children took donkey rides, had their faces painted, played on the swings and raced to blow a pingpong ball from one end of a water-filled pan to the other.

"We all have a little child in us and it’s fun to get together and let your hair down," said the Rev. Gene Vosseler, a church member for 16 years. "Life is serious enough. If you get too serious you lose your perspective."

It wasn’t all fun and games. Everybody had their fill of grilled teriyaki chicken, burgers, hotdogs, salads, macrobiotic entrees and watermelon. After all that, they still had room for the anniversary cake.

The cake, wheeled out in a golf cart, was seven tiers, stood four feet high, weighed 100 pounds, fed 450 people and took three men to carry to a nearby picnic table. There were also 24 smaller cakes.

The church’s headquarters in Montana is home for more than 550 full-time staff members and their families. The community gives people a chance to work out their ideals in a practical manner, whether it’s organic farming or advanced methods of early education.

"The church is proving that such a community can exist and that people can change their lives, transform themselves and make it in this century," said staff member Christine Mahurin.

"I think we’ve got something really great going here," said Tatiana. "And I’m excited to be part of it because I think we’re all working toward finding some solutions to the world’s problems. And the difference is that we want to include God in a really innovative way."

Brewster, Christine, Elizabeth, Gene, Mark, Ruth, Tatiana, Valery.
Church Universal And Triumphant religion, Pearls Of Wisdom, Royal Teton Ranch News, Summit Lighthouse religion, newspaper article, newspaper clipping.

Royal Teton Ranch, Corwin Springs, Montana.

September, 1993.

… Read my blog at ClintJCL.wordpress.com

Elizabeth Prophet was Mark Prophet’s 2nd wife, after Clint’s grandmotherGrandma.

Mark Prophet is Clint’s granddad (mom’s dad), who started his own cult, The Summit Lighthouse.
To see how he is viewed via cult members, look at his official church page: web.archive.org/web/20080622195145/http://www.tsl.org/Mas…
To see how he is viewed via ex-cult members, read Mark Prophet, The Man And The Myth, reposted at my uncle’s blog: www.blacksunjournal.com/mark-prophet/1463_mark-prophet-th…
… View my half-aunt Tatiana’s photos at www.flickr.com/photos/lavoyeuse/